In December 1968, engineer and inventor Douglas C. Engelbart and a team of more than a dozen engineers and staff from the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center (AHIRC) gave a demonstration at San Francisco’s Civic Center Auditorium to show off what they called the oN-Line System (NLS). The demo, which lasted for about an hour and a half, became known as “The Mother of All Demos” because for many of the 1,000 computer technology professionals in the audience, it was the first time they saw personal computers used interactively, rather than crunching numbers via punch cards.
Engelbart began his work two decades earlier while he was stationed in the Philippines as a Navy radar technician during WWII. There, he read an essay by Vannevar Bush called “As We May Think,” which proposed furthering human intellect and memory through the use of a hypothetical machine called the Memex. After the war, Engelbart joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where he published a 1962 paper called “Augmenting the Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The following year, Engelbart’s research was funded by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (or ARPA, now known widely as DARPA) as well as NASA.
The research was first sponsored by J.C.R. Licklider, and then by Robert Taylor, who is widely credited with building an early version of a networked system, called the ARPAnet, which helped researchers at various labs share their work. (Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at SRI was the second host on the ARPAnet.)
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